[Geany-devel] On coding style

[Lex Trotman]

>
> I agree to all of that, except for the last part. I don't like these
> scripts, since teaching programmers in the first place on a good coding
> style in is the better way to enforce it.

Oh well we'll have to agree to disagree on this (again :-)

I've never found manual style enforcement to be efficient or
effective, & "teaching good style" comes back to personal decisions
about what is "good".

The learning curve on
> project-specific style is mostly quite short, while this scripts make
> programmers just careless about coding style in general (not project
> specific), and might be buggy at times messing up style everywhere.
>

Yes, normally I recommend using one of the mature formatters, even
dear old GNU indent, since they are less likely to be buggy, but then
turning off all the features you don't want is not always easy.  Most
give options like: for this code feature do this or do that but no
option to do nothing.  So sometimes limited scripts are the way to go,
especially for projects with established styles that don't quite match
the programs.  In past experiments and discussions with Nick I never
came up with one that quite matched Geany.

Cheers
Lex